WHEN THREE WEEKS IS AN ETERNITY:

WAR'S SURPRISES MAKE PEACE AN ELUSIVE GOAL (David Shribman, 4/01/03)

Great Britain and the United States didn't count on Saddam Hussein being able to rally his country (or even to survive the first day's missile attacks). They didn't count on the Iraqi people resisting the allied incursion; or on the difficulty in maintaining supply lines in the desert; or on obstacles on the way to Baghdad; or on the likelihood of the use of suicide bombers, until now mostly a terrorist tactic, as a tool of war in conflict between states.

Nor did the two countries fully comprehend the most terrifying prospect of this new Gulf War -- the notion that weapons of mass destruction might be converted from frightful, forbidden implements of conflict into symbols of nationalism that could be used, to the applause of the masses, to keep invading forces at bay. Such a development would provide unprecedented peril to allied combatants and would upend the moral calculus of the West.

That is the danger stalking in the words of Iraq's Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, who, after last weekend's taxi suicide bombing, said, "Any method that stops or kills the enemy will be used."

The Bush administration is arguing that it never promised a brisk war, but Vice President Dick Cheney expressed the prevailing attitude last month when he said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that the war in Iraq would be a matter of "weeks rather than months."

He could still be right, of course. But the public isn't so sure. A week ago, a majority of Americans expected the war to last two months; now, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, a majority believes it will last three months.

So, if it turns out Dick Cheney and the American People were right, and the war doesn't last two months (or one, for that matter), do all the Shribmans have to print public retractions of their hysterical columns? Posted by Orrin Judd at April 3, 2003 12:51 PM